Tag: Golden Dome

The Militarized Insanity of this American Moment

A “Top Ten” List

BILL ASTORE

AUG 04, 2026

There’s so much militarized crazy in America today that it’s entirely overwhelming. Here’s a “top ten” list:

1. The illegal and unconstitutional war against Iran.

Remember when Trump told us he wouldn’t start wars? Remember when attacks on Iran began, the Trump administration told us they’d be over in a matter of days, perhaps a few weeks, ending in Iran’s total defeat? Instead, the U.S. government and military is engaged in yet another disastrous losing undeclared war that is unsupported by most Americans. As if our opinions matter!

2. The continued blanket support of Israel’s genocide against Gaza, pogroms in the West Bank, and demolition/seizure of land in Lebanon.

The Trump administration remains 100% committed to the project of a “Greater Israel,” no matter how many Palestinians suffer and die in the process.

3. The obscene $500 billion increase in military spending in FY2027.

The U.S. military hasn’t won a major war since 1945. It’s failed eight audits in a row. The “punishment” is a vast increase in military spending in the next fiscal year.

4. The escalatory and nearly impossible Golden Dome proposal.

The golden dome missile defense system is a golden boondoggle for weapons makers. It’s unlikely to work, and if it does, if only partially, it may make nuclear war more likely.

5. The unnecessary “modernization” of the nuclear triad at a projected cost of $2 trillion.

U.S. militarists still believe the nuclear triad is the Holy Trinity. It isn’t. Land-based ICBMs and nuclear bombers should be scrapped as obsolete. The Navy’s Trident-missile-firing submarines are all the U.S. needs for nuclear deterrence.

6. The continued headlong pursuit of artificial intelligence (AI) and the ongoing empowerment and enlargement of the surveillance state.

AI combined with ever-more intrusive cameras and digital monitoring is creating a dystopic “Big Brother” state. Imagine sweeping AI with a steroidal Homeland Security; now imagine the total disappearance of privacy.

7. The war against the ICC and UN and indeed any legal check on U.S./Israeli aggression.

As the U.S. and Israel engage in global aggression, they attack institutions such as the International Criminal Court and the United Nations that attempt to limit and stop that aggression.

8. Related to (7), the proposal to merge the U.S. military with Israel’s for research and development, intelligence sharing, and the like.

Incredibly, the Trump administration is proposing a merger between the U.S. and Israeli militaries that would compromise U.S. national security at the highest levels of classification. Obedient to Aipac and Israeli imperatives, Congress seems prepared ultimately to support it.

9. Continued environmental damage due to war and military operations and the complete disregard of climate change.

Rarely in the U.S. do you hear any talk of how war and global military actions accelerate global warming and aggravate environmental damage. Check out the documentary by Abby Martin, “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,” and her interview with Chris Hedges.

10. The abandonment of the citizen-soldier tradition in the U.S., the embrace of a warrior ethos, and the increasing contempt for diversity within the military.

The last war America won (with serious help from allies like the Soviet Union) was World War II, also the last time America had a true citizen-soldier military. Since then, America has increasingly embraced a warrior ethos. And while diversity used to be a hallmark of the U.S. military, it is now under attack as “woke” by Pete Hegseth.

There you have it: ten signs of America’s increasingly militarized madness. Greater sanity would involve the reversal of all of these.

Golden Dome as a Golden Boondoggle

And Perhaps a Golden Ticket to Nuclear War

BILL ASTORE

JUL 29, 2026

Golden Dome, President Trump’s ambitious dangerously escalatory missile defense shield, may cost Americans as much as $18 billion in the next fiscal year. According to my AI friends (perhaps soon to be running Golden Dome under the name of Skynet), here’s where the bulk of the money is slated to go:

  • Missile Warning and Tracking: $6.8 billion to develop Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellite constellations.
  • Space-Based Interceptors (SBIs): $3.2 billion for initial contracts with defense developers like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Anduril Industries.
  • Space Domain Awareness: $1.6 billion specifically to monitor and safeguard the dome’s own network from adversarial threats.
  • Personnel Expansion: Funding to hire 506 full-time civilian employees to accelerate homeland missile defense development. 

What scares me the most about Golden Dome is that it might eventually work — somewhat. Thus it could weaken deterrence and increase the chances of a nuclear exchange.

Allow me to explain. In theory, the U.S. could attack a weaker nuclear state with an incapacitating “first strike,” with Golden Dome being used to intercept the few missiles/warheads remaining to the adversary. This scenario, more than possible under leaders like Trump and Hegseth, might force a cornered adversary to launch everything they have in an all-out strike on the U.S., with the goal of overwhelming whatever system is fielded under the Golden Dome moniker.

Fear of scenarios such as this led to the ABM Treaty that greatly restricted the deployment of missile defense interceptors. The policy of MAD, or mutually assured destruction, was kept in place as a form of deterrence. It’s grotesque but it worked. What would happen if one side with nukes had to worry far less about a nuclear attack because they possessed a shield or dome of sorts?

We laugh to hide the tears …

It’s certainly possible Golden Dome will never prove that effective while wasting colossal sums of money. Indeed, that might be the “best case” scenario. It’s also possible it could prove moderately effective, emboldening a nuclear power in possession of the same to threaten others, even as other nuclear powers, China for example, expand their arsenals and plans for a large-scale first strike.

The sensible way ahead is to scrap this ultra-expensive “dome” and to work toward negotiated reductions in nuclear weapons globally. You don’t need to intercept missiles and warheads if they’re never built.

Nuclear Mass Death

Dyin’ Ain’t Much of a Living

BILL ASTORE

JUL 08, 2026

Mark Twain was right when he said history may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

Consider America’s approach to nuclear weapons. Under Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, America’s strategic nuclear triad was modernized at immense cost. One hundred B-1 bombers were built. The stealthy B-2 bomber followed. MX “Peacekeeper” ICBMs were deployed. New Ohio-class nuclear subs armed with Trident missiles were launched. Pershing II and GLCMs (ground-launched cruise missiles) were fielded in Europe. And Reagan presented his idea of a missile defense shield, known as the strategic defense initiative (SDI) or informally as “Star Wars.” All this cost enormous sums of money.

Fortunately, the Pershing IIs and GLCMs were retired under talks that eliminated intermediate-range nuclear missiles. The Peacekeeper missiles are already gone. The B-1s are due to be retired over the next decade and no longer fly nuclear missions. And the Ohio-class submarine force, the most survivable leg of the nuclear triad, remains on station, with just one submarine capable of destroying much of the world.

Air Force B-2 bomber being refueled

The U.S. today possesses an enormous nuclear overkill capacity. The arsenal consists of roughly 5000 nuclear bombs and warheads. Again, just one submarine carries up to 20 Trident II D5 missiles with multiple nuclear warheads, each warhead being far more powerful than the bombs used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. To borrow a line from Daniel Ellsberg, each submarine is capable of 100 Holocausts. They are genocidal weapons to a degree that is unimaginable. By the way, the U.S. has fourteen Ohio-class “boomer” submarines.

Here is where history rhymes. Under yet another tough-talking Republican president, the U.S. today is yet again “modernizing” its nuclear triad while imagining a missile defense shield (now known as “Golden Dome”). The Air Force wants a new nuclear bomber (the B-21 Raider) and ICBM (the Sentinel), and the Navy wants a new ballistic-missile-firing submarine, the Columbia-class.

None of this is really necessary. ICBMs are obsolete; they are static targets and destabilizing ones at that. Bombers are superfluous and besides, the Air Force still has B-52s and B-2s for nuclear missions. Missile shields like “Golden Dome” are easy to conceptualize but impossible to build. They can be fooled by decoys and overwhelmed by an enemy with sufficient warheads (Russia). 

But logic doesn’t matter here. Nor does morality. What matters is money, power, jobs, and the military-industrial-Congressional complex. That’s why history is rhyming here. The MICC will always fight for more ICBMs, more bombers, more submarines because that is its health, its wealth, its reason for being. To the MICC, the nuclear triad really is the holy trinity. It is something to be worshipped and preserved irrespective of cost and logic.

The U.S. should lead the world in reducing the deployment of nuclear weapons. Instead, the U.S. leads in nuclear escalation. And it does so always in the stated cause of “deterrence” when the real reason is the health and wealth of the MICC.

No one really knows how much nuclear triad modernization and the “Golden Dome” will cost; estimates for both reach $3 trillion over the next thirty years. But it’s not just the cost in dollars that matters — it’s the cost to our collective existence. These weapons systems are making the U.S. and the world less safe, less stable, rather than more so. They are possibly the very worst examples of human folly, and that’s truly saying something.

I very much doubt the average American wants more nuclear bombs and missiles, but what we want doesn’t seem to matter. The MICC wants — and it gets what it wants. It does so by scaring us about Russia or China or Iran while selling these genocidal weapons as job-creators. It’s a living, they might say. But as the Outlaw Josey Wales once said, “Dyin’ ain’t much of a living,” especially when you’re talking about murdering most of humanity in a genocidal nuclear war.

We must put a stop to this madness while we still can.

Golden Dome Idiocy

A “shield” against nuclear attack makes nuclear war more likely

BILL ASTORE

JUN 09, 2025

Donald Trump has a dream: a “golden dome” over America to defend the country against nuclear missiles. It’s a repeat of Ronald Reagan’s dream, the Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed “Star Wars” after the movie. The problem is that the dream represents a nightmare.

How so? Golden Dome would be dangerously escalatory, wildly expensive, and unlikely to work as a “shield” to America. It is worse than a mistake: it is a crime. It represents a massive theft from those who hunger and suffer in America. As Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in 1953, wasting enormous resources on weapons systems is no way of life at all. It is humanity crucifying itself on a cross of iron. Crucifixion is not made more pleasant when the cross is golden.

A new golden idol occupies his mind

Put differently, the Golden Dome is a golden idol, a false god, one that by making a massive nuclear strike more likely endangers all of us and God’s creation.

Golden Dome is a grotesque example of makework militarism and warfare as welfare for weapons makers. Though it’s unlikely to work, if it did (partially) it would make a massive nuclear strike more likely, not less, endangering the world with the ecocidal terror of nuclear winter.

Golden Dome and the so-called investment in America’s nuclear triad are both examples of socio-technological madness–America’s leaders are like the mutants in “Beneath the Planet of the Apes,” worshipping the bombs that twisted them and which can only destroy what’s left of civilization.

Some Christians today await the apocalypse when Christ is supposed to return–but the most likely apocalypse features not the second coming of a God-man but a third world war featuring bomb-gods of thermonuclear destruction.

As Daniel Ellsberg once noted, U.S. nuclear attack plans in the early 1960s envisioned 600 million killed, or 100 Holocausts (before we knew such an attack would lead to nuclear winter). We’re lucky this insanity never came to pass. The only sane policy is to cancel Golden Dome and end “investment” in a new nuclear triad. Disarmament, not rearmament, is what’s needed.

*****

The Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space has released a statement against Golden Dome that you can read here. You can add your name to the statement, as I have. Here are some bullet points released along with the statement:

  • Golden Dome is financially reckless and unsustainable. Early cost estimates range from $550 billion to several trillion dollars over two decades. This dwarfs even the Pentagon’s annual budget and adds to the US’s $37 trillion national debt—a price tag that makes the project fiscally indefensible.
  • Experts overwhelmingly agree that 100% effective missile interception is a fantasy, especially against complex attacks involving decoys, hypersonic missiles, and maneuverable warheads. Even Israel’s Iron Dome has been bypassed by more rudimentary drone and missile attacks.
  • Golden Dome includes space-based interceptors—effectively weaponizing the Earth’s orbit and triggering an arms race. This violates the spirit of the Outer Space Treaty and pushes nations like China and Russia to accelerate space weapons development.
  • By giving the illusion of first-strike survivability, it runs counter to the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) doctrine that has prevented so far a nuclear holocaust and incentivizes other powers to retain or expand their nuclear arsenals, blocking disarmament efforts permanently.
  • Thousands of rocket launches for satellite interceptors would further damage the ozone layer, could generate dangerous orbital debris (Kessler Syndrome), and will harm our already fragile space environment.
  • The only guaranteed winners of Golden Dome are weapons giants like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Palantir, which stand to profit enormously regardless of the system’s effectiveness or risks.
  • The trillions funneled into Golden Dome could be used for urgent domestic priorities—such as healthcare, infrastructure, climate action, and education, directly benefiting millions of Americans.

In short, Golden Dome is a massive, dangerous, and futile vanity project, cloaked in patriotism but driven by profit, politics, and illusion.

Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” Robs the Poor and Rewards the Rich

More Walls, A “Golden” Dome, More Weapons, Higher Deficits, Make this a Petty Ugly Bill

BILL ASTORE

MAY 23, 2025

The “Big Beautiful Bill” passed recently by the House is petty and ugly. A sham. A reverse Robin Hood. It cuts SNAP benefits (food stamps) to the poor. It cuts Medicaid. Because who needs food and medical care, amirite? Meanwhile, it cuts taxes for the richest Americans and funds various weapons follies (a foolish and wasteful missile shield known as “Golden Dome,” more nuclear weapons, yet more billions for the wall on America’s border with Mexico). And it adds significantly to the national debt.

Remember when Republicans were once known as fiscal conservatives? Remember calls for a balanced budget? Those days are long gone. The “Big Beautiful Bill” is a fever dream, or a night terror if you prefer, of wanton and wasteful spending that rewards the already well-heeled and hurts the most vulnerable of Americans.

Trump, who is truly an expert at the craft of the con, concocts the most outrageous names to sell his BS. Thus a missile shield that may end up wasting $500 billion is a “golden dome.” Heck, the whole bill, which is contempuous toward the poor and punishing to workers organizing for higher wages, is sold as “big” and “beautiful.”

When Trump describes things as “golden” and “big” and “beautiful,” you should know to hold tightly to your wallets and purses, America, because you’re about to get scammed.

At his site, Stephen Semler has a superb chart that breaks down the petty ugly bill the House just passed. Here’s an excerpt. Read it and weep, America.

The bottom line: More money for the already affluent and for the Pentagon; less money and benefits for the poor. The rich get richer, the poor poorer, as America reinforces its turn to weapons, walls, police, domes, and warriors.